Wine 61 Dandelion Wine Recipe

Ingredients
1-3/4 lb., or about two gallon bowls, dandelion flowers, with calyxes mostly removed;
2 gallons-plus of water, boiled;
5 lbs. sugar;
5 lemons, organic, chopped;
Montrachet yeast (only partial packet);
1 year's worth of patience.

Martha did all the picking on this batch. While I use a jackknife, she uses small clippers for cutting off the lower green cup, or calyx, of the flower. The tops of the green sepals remain. (Leaving the calyxes on is an option, adding a bit more bitter quality to the end-taste.)

I boiled the water a few minutes, then poured over the flowers. Covered; let sit.

The next day, I sterilized a three-gallon Red Wing stoneware crock. Poured in sugar. Sterilized large sieve; through it, poured dandelion water. Chopped the lemons -- not too finely. Threw them in. Sprinkled yeast. I used an enamelware lid large enough to fit this mid-sized crock.

This batch I plan to leave in the crock, stirring once daily, until the fizzing activity is noticeably diminished -- which may take only a week. I'll move the batch into secondary -- which may end up being two one-gallon jugs, unless I decide to combine it with another dandelion wine batch to go into the three-gallon secondary glass fermenter (assuming it to be available at that time).

The batch will remain in secondary for a month or two or more; then will be in bottles until next spring.

Cheers ...

Ancient Hairlines, Part IV

The fact that hairlines fail to recede must come as welcome news -- and that they never recede ...

A pleased-with-themselves pair of antique buyers at a farm auction outbid us on an intact four-gallon crock, a week ago. Four gallons is a particularly useful size, at our scale of operations; but the price got out of hand, to our point of view.

This self-satisfied couple then bought a crock with an interesting front marking but with notable cracks in the interior that rendered it unusable. I might have bid ten dollars or so on the thing, on the grounds of aesthetics or curiosity; but this couple and someone else bid up the crock's price to more than four times that amount, without much reluctance about tossing their cash into so clearly compromised a vessel -- with the self-satisifed couple winning it.

The collector who buys crocks with so many cracks ... does the crock have multiple cracks, or does the cracked collector who buys them have multiple hairlines? An interesting image ...

Cheers ...

Ten to Five

In the last wine-making entry, as you may have noticed, I spoke of putting a ten-gallon stoneware crock to use -- with a five-gallon glass carboy to hold the results when going on to the next step in the winemaking process.

While I am unsure how it works in other sorts of food preparation involving crocks, with winemaking it seems that a one-gallon crock yields liquid results of less than a gallon for the secondary fermentation. If we would fill the crock to the brim, near to spilling, maybe everything would match right down the line: one-gallon stoneware for primary -- to one-gallon jug for secondary -- to one gallon of bottled wine for aging.

Filling a crock so extremely full is not my method. Some wines call for stirring, during primary fermentation: so you need a bit of extra space, for agitating it without making a mess. More significantly for our current set-up, it almost always happens that I am moving crocks and fermenters around. Last fall the primaries were in my rear work room -- while the wine-making work took place in the kitchen, which is several rooms away. Now, you try moving a crock full to the brim without making the precious wine-makings quiver and slosh.

Wear rubber clothes, if you do.

With the ten-gallon crock, I figured I could prepare a batch to fill the five-gallon carboy to an ideal level. Not so. It fell short. Maybe I lost enough liquid through evaporation; maybe I misjudged in the first place.

That crock, by the way, stayed on the work bench. I am foolhardy, but not to the extent that I would attempt to lift a massive piece of stoneware full of none-too-light liquids, let alone carry it anywhere. The makings moved into their secondary from right where the crock sat -- although I did carry that five-gallon glass secondary out to the kitchen for bottling, somehow managing not to stir up the lees despite the distance.

Cheers ...

On the First Floor

Here on the first floor of our house we have, at the moment, a five-gallon crock (Western Stoneware, with a maple-leaf decoration) full of beer Martha made which may go into a secondary fermenter today; and a three-gallon Red Wing crock with sorghum beer that I started last Friday. And in the back room is a five-gallon carboy with LaCrosse grape wine in its secondary-fermentation stage, which I suppose I could start bottling any day now. Martha was kind enough to order in some corks with her latest beer-making supplies.

I was just thinking of these, and then of the unknown numbers of gallons of wine in secondary fermentation in the basement -- not a huge amount; but the variety is not bad -- and was thinking, too, how similar the situation is to my miscellaneous writing projects. Who knows how many I have, in the basement. Here on the main living floor, I have just a few projects in active or semi-active state.

I just checked my wine-making notes. The carboy of wine is mostly LaCrosse grapes, with some Edelweiss, and also some that I thought might be the Alpenglow variety. All these were grown by Bob at Vernon Vineyards, in nearby Vernon County. All are northern grape varieties; all are Elmer Swenson varieties. In LaCrosse, a white grape, I remember the bunches being tightly packed and compact. The Edelweiss are a large white-Concord-type, extremely flavorful. The Alpenglow have a slight, quite attractive blush to the skin.

Homegrown hops, by the way, went into the sorghum beer.